Many people now have multiple computing devices. For example, many people now have one or more smartphones (personal and/or business related), a tablet computing device, a laptop computing device and even a desktop computing device. A person with multiple computing devices can use the computing devices to store content within a data store of a service provider network that provides data storage services. For example, a person might take pictures with their smartphone and store the pictures within the data store of the service provider network. Later, the person may be using one of their other computing devices and may wish to access the photos with the other computing device. Thus, a person generally desires all of the content stored on their various computing devices to be synchronized with each other and up to date.
Generally, in order to synchronize the content stored on all of a user's computing devices, when a computing device is turned on and becomes active, the computing device will poll the service provider network for either all of the user's content that is stored within the data store of the service provider network. Alternatively, the computing device will simply poll the service provider network to provide any changed or updated content from the data store related to the person's account. While active, in order to remain up to date and synchronized, the computing devices will also periodically poll the service provider network for changed or updated content from the data store. Often, such polling can occur every 15 seconds, for example.
While such queries are generally minor, such queries from millions of users and their multiple computing devices can result in an extremely large number of queries. Thus, as can be seen, the aggregate of many minor queries can consume significant computing resources within a service provider network. Furthermore, often approximately half (or even more) of the queries to the service provider network data store indicate that no changes have occurred with respect to the user's account since the last query. As a result, significant computing resources are being consumed even though no changes have occurred.
The disclosure made herein is presented with respect to these and other considerations.